Yale Needs Women

June 24, 2019
This smart, lively first book by Perkins, a higher education scholar and Yale graduate, challenges a “sanitized tale of equity instantly achieved” when the elite university, after 268 years, admitted female undergraduates in 1969. The pressure to admit women wasn’t about gender equality, she writes: male undergraduates were tired of waiting until weekends to socialize with young women from other schools, and Yale’s rival Princeton was going coed. After Yale’s announcement, thousands of women applied; the school enrolled 575, 90% of them white. Perkins highlights five students, among them trombonist Kit McClure, and field hockey player Lawrie Mifflin. McClure, initially barred from the marching band, joined a women’s liberation rock group; Mifflin organized a field hockey team that eventually received varsity status. The new students also organized feminist groups and pushed for courses exploring women’s issues; the university’s health service launched a human sexuality course. But female students still confronted social isolation, sexual violence, and harassment. The university resisted a gender-blind admissions policy until 1972’s Title IX of the Educational Amendments to the Civil Rights Act made it inevitable. Perkins succeeds admirably in restoring these women’s fascinating voices and weaving in the larger historical context. This is a valuable contribution to the history of higher education, women, and the postwar U.S. Illus. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, DeFiore and Company Literary Management.

July 12, 2019

For 268 years, Yale University was an all-men's college, but in the summer of 1969, all that changed when the first women were admitted. Debut author Perkins, a former high school teacher and education policymaker, reveals the struggles and triumphs of the institution's first women as she explores its move to coeducation from 1969 through 1972. Drawing on primary source documents and oral histories, she provides both the student and administrative perspectives, as women navigated housing, sex education, classes, privilege, isolation, and politics. Perkins focuses on a few women and brings their voices to the fore of the historical and political happenings of the time, including the broader issues of gender and racial inequality and the strife of the Vietnam War, imbuing this slice of history with depth. VERDICT This stunning, engaging work highlights the strength and courage of women who fought for their future against centuries of patriarchy. Perfect for readers interested in seeing how far women have come--and how far they still have yet to go.--Rachel Wadham, Brigham Young Univ. Libs., Provo, UT

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2019
An educational policy expert examines the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that marked the early years of the Yale University experiment in coeducation. Until 1969, Yale was "a village of men." But as Perkins, the first woman editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, shows, Yale faced cultural currents from within and without that forced it to change. Coeducation had been the norm at Harvard, Yale's closest Ivy peer, since 1943. By 1968, Yale students were demanding an end to the "stifling social environment" that forced them to seek female company in women bused in from all-women colleges like Vassar. In the end, the students got their wish, but the early years of the transition to a coeducational campus were tumultuous. Behind-the-scenes administrative power struggles emerged between Yale President Kingman Brewster and Elga Wasserman, the assistant dean who spearheaded coeducation efforts. Kingman favored a slow transition that would still leave female students far outnumbered by males. By contrast, Wasserman, a perpetually embattled female administrator in a system controlled by men, favored greater parity sooner rather than later. The "threadbare budget" Yale provided Wasserman also proved problematic, especially in her efforts to create a safer campus for female undergraduates, who dealt with sexual harassment from both their professors and male peers. Perkins' interviews with some of the 575 young women undergraduates who came to Yale in 1969 reveal that many felt alienated and alone. Despite the challenges they faced--such as housing and health care facilities that did not take their needs into account--the first women students at Yale found strength in the bonds they created with each other and through the nascent feminist movement, and they went on to open doors to other women in all-male domains such as the Yale athletics and marching band programs. As it celebrates female achievement, the author's focus on a single university also narrows the readership to scholars of higher education and a Yale-affiliated audience. Well-researched but with limited appeal.

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August 1, 2019
Yale president Kingman Brewster agreed to open admissions to women on the condition that they not affect the university's commitment to a class of one thousand leaders ?male leaders, natch. A little over 500 female freshman, sophomores, and juniors arrived on campus in 1969, including Kit McClure, who hoped to play her trombone in a rock band; Shirley Daniels, a sophomore who transferred to Yale for its Afro-American studies program; Lawrie Mifflin, field-hockey star; along with Elga Wasserman, the administrator responsible for co-education, whose title was merely Special Assistant to the President. Though none of the women started college as feminists, the isolation they felt during their first years at Yale inspired them to organize and fight for health-care access, racial justice, and gender-blind admissions. Today's activists may be dismayed at how much has not changed in the fight for progress?tone policing, demands for institutional autonomy?and though Perkins (Yale class of 1981) does not sugarcoat history, the 360-degree approach she takes makes Yale Needs Women an engaging, entertaining, thoughtful work of popular history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)